Latest Weekend Project: The Ultivator : No Pain, No Gain

Both my wife and I love our Fitbit trackers, but both of us find them a bit wanting in the motivational department.

A few weeks ago we were talking about the reasons most people don’t stick with an exercise program is usually due to the lack of real and proper, serious motivation. People just won’t make changes to their lives unless they receive a huge positive OR negative stimulus. For example, an obese person could visit the doctor yearly and be told that he needs to lose weight but never actually does it. Only if he survives a near fatal heart attack might he actually make the lifestyle changes in order to live longer.

Since a huge negative stimulus (having a heart attack) has been proven to get more people off their butts than a positive stimulus (wearing nicer clothes, being noticed by the opposite sex etc) we came up with the Ultimate Motivator – aka the Ultivator.

The idea is simple: You set a goal. If you meet that goal, you don’t get penalized. If you don’t meet that goal, then you do. I whipped it together in a weekend in Rails and Bootstrap. It might not look too good, but I think it suffices as a great example of MVP.

Right now it supports only Fitbit trackers, but I will be adding more trackers as well as more goals as I get feedback. The process is simple, you provide:

The goal you wish to hit: we WERE going to make these extra hard, but we figured that people have all different levels that they’d like to reach and so we left this open. A step goal for the month.

The charity you’d like your “penalty” to go to. We give the brunt of the charge to a charity of your choice, so even if you don’t make your goal, at least someone you like benefits

The amount you’d like to contribute, pro-rated to how well you do: for example, let’s say you pledge $500 and make it half way to your goal, we only charge you $250. Make it all the way you pay a tiny admin fee.

The site sends an email with the users status daily so that they can keep abreast of their progress – it looks like this:

Let me know what you all think. Over the next little while, I’ll come back to the Ultivator and talk a bit about some of the other inspiration I had for this project – a little thing a few folks ripped out in 20 minutes called http://producthunt.co

This is pure MVP IMHO, there are a lot more things I’d like to add, such as the ability to track other things other than steps, but this is a good start.